Being blitzed out of my brain might make sense of L.A.

Celia Walden on why Beverly Hills mums are going to pot

This!’ my 18-month old squeals, handing me a book she has managed to pull off the kitchen table. I look at the book’s title: It’s Just a Plant: A Children’s Story About Marijuana. Then I shout out to my husband, barbecuing himself on a pool lounger outside. What the…? The book was a gift from the Beverly Hills pot moms, he shouts back. Of course it was. It’s in our kitchen, alongside a copy of Henry Hemp (a comic book featuring Henry the hemp leaf as a superhero saving the world against evil lawmakers), because Piers interviewed the self-styled 'Marijuana Moms’ – a glamorous clique of businesswomen who insist marijuana makes them better parents – on his TV show. And he told them that he’s married to a fellow Beverly Hills mum.

Had anyone told me five years ago that I’d one day fit that description, I’d have advised them to stop smoking herb, reefer, muggles, sinsemilla – or whatever else they call it out here. Today, there’s no use denying it: I am a Beverly Hills mum. What I don’t do, however, is munch on green-budded chocolate cookies while the little one naps or sit cross-legged inhaling from a bong as my daughter and her playmates make Cheerio soup on her Fisher-Price kitchen unit. Maybe I should. Maybe being blitzed out of my brain would make sense of this town. But so far, the only encounter my daughter has had with hippie lettuce was when we took her to Venice Beach as a three-month-old and the fumes on the boardwalk upset her so much that I had to breastfeed her in a backstreet doorway to calm her down. ('That’s beautiful,’ a corn-rowed old dude murmured as he passed by.)

The Beverly Hills pot moms do make a surprisingly good argument, however – albeit one that would work only in this land of extremes. Their main point is that in a country where mothers routinely pop Vicodin instead of Tylenol, mild doses of medicinal marijuana ingested (but never smoked around the kids) is a less harmful way of blunting pain and anxiety. Glenda – one of the Marijuana Moms – even insists that taking the drug has 'made me more interactive with my kids’. That may be true. Mother’s always had a little helper. But all other reservations aside, it’s worth considering that the combination of motherhood (which can transform the most quick-witted woman into a dullard overnight) and being permanently semi-stoned is likely to turn you into the most boring conversationalist on the planet.